Recent reviews by Garfield | >^.^<

"Stay a while and listen" (blizzy pls don't sue me, k, thx, bai!) ... or in this case, read a wall of text :P


What I first noticed about the game is its menu, it's simple, clear, all a menu should be.

Then the game started with the tutorial, forcing me to play it. I did not see a "skip tutorial" button (my bad if there was but pretty sure there wasn't).
Not nice forcing people to do something they don't want to, give them the option to choose.
And if you are going to argue that they had to do that the way they did so people would learn about the characters and their mechanics then i say to you: "I'm sorry but I do not agree!"

There are better ways to introduce important stuff then forcing it on people, hide it like Portal and Portal 2 did - almost the whole game is a tutorial preparing the player for what is to come, but we are not here to talk about Portal, Gauntlet time.
The tutorial on its own was put together nicely, introducing the characters and their mechanics through gameplay rather then through text, which is always nice.

The characters are ok-ish defined.
The Warrior being a warrior can take damage as well as dish out damage of his own.
The Elf uses range attacks to defeat his enemies, although his range isn't that great. I expected more from an elf ranger.
The Valkyrie is a nice mix of the two (i particularly liked the Captain America like shield throw).
These three characters are pretty straightforward, but the Wizard is a bit more complicated.
Having 9 spells to choose from, the Wizard can access his spells with a certain button combination. The desired spell is then ready to use, assuming its not on cooldown.
Not too intuitive, and a bit confusing at first but fiddle around with the spell combinations and you will get the hang of it.

I must point out that the ice spells were not as useful to me as the other two types of spells (fire and lightning) and i ended up playing mostly with fire and lightning spells, and even here with not all of them.

The Fire Bomb is useless if you are near a doorway or a low ceiling-ish area it will hit the ceiling and explode dealing no damage to the monsters below it or it won't end up exploding where you expected it to cause it ended up hitting something you did not thought possible (could be a bug or just bad design).

Also Lightning Discharge was of no use to me, if i wanted to knock someone back I can use my Storm Barrier, so I ended up using it only when I incorrectly combined buttons to get a spell.

The RPG elements are kind of wierd in concept and implementation.
If you buy armour and weapons you only get a cosmetic change. But you can also buy relics to give you buffs to your speed, damage, attack speed or the ability to summon illusions or a demonic gargoyle to fight by your side.
However you can only have 2 relics and can not use any without potions. These potions you can not buy, they can only be found throughout the levels, as well as food which restores hit points.

Instead of gaining traditional levels for each character, you can only improve your stats by performing achievement-like actions called Masteries. For example killing 10,000 monsters grants a 10 % damage bonus.

First time around, the structure of the game is interesting and the level design is a mix of pre-made and randomly generated environment.
Some levels are more complex than others, tasking you or the group to push blocks, insert statues into spots, or fill a lava pool to raise a bridge and then finally an okay-ish boss battle.

The campaign is broken up into three acts, with four stages, four repetitive stages.
Each set of those stages unfolds in the same way:
First you start with a standard level, then you move on to a shorter level with a frustrating twist like being chased by death which btw is bad at its job and its not so hard to outrun (just frustrating) or a dark cave eating away at your nerves as you try to hold back the urge to pluck out your hair and then (as i already mentioned) a boss fight.

Higher difficulty only makes enemies more resistant to damage and drop more gold.
Once the campaign is finished there’s not much incentive to revisit and replay the game.

The A.I. is not to bright either. Getting stuck frequently on each other, corners, doorways and other stuff lying around the level.
After some time you notice how they move and can kite them around the level making them easy targets. Easier than they would have been on their own.

And a one last thing, the camera, oh boy ...
The view is zoomed out far enough to cover an area, but not far enough for a four player co-op play through. The camera does not follow any player controlled characters but hovers above an area of the level and its easy to lose sight of your character.
Additionally if any teammate goes idle you can't move on without them cause the camera will stand still in an area and try to cover all players.

I am sure that Arrowhead did their best but they neither went full retro nor did they break from the past.
As i see this game, its like they tried to stay close to the original (Gauntlet from 1985) but not to close cause people my not like it today and tried to make it an appealing 2014 role-play, dungeon crawl, hack and slash game but actually got stuck in the middle of it all resulting in a not so good game.

In short its repetitive and overly simplistic, awkward camera, an uninteresting upgrade system and too little substance or variety to satisfy players.
However, with four committed players the co-op works well, and it’s certainly not the worst Gauntlet revamp there’s ever been.

All in all IMHO this game is a 5.5 / 10, nice try but u failed, sry and i do not recommend this game.

good game, not good as 1.6 was but its ok